Remembering An Angel Who Left Too Soon: Owen Hart

This is a re-publishing of an article I wrote last summer, originally titled Owen Hart—The First Nail in Pro Wrestling's Coffin.

So this summer has been all kinds of hectic, and it has stopped me from writing much since the NHL Free Agent sweepstakes hit.  But last night, as I neared the end of what for me is easily the best Pro Wrestling autobiography ever written, that of Bret Hart, the emotion of his story hit me—it's still hitting me as I type this forward.  The chills don't go away, and they haven't for nine years.  For any fans, feel free to leave comments and stories about how this affected you.  For true fans, it'll affect us forever.

May 23, 1999. Do you remember this day? Probably not. Unfortunately for me, all the concussions in the world wouldn't take this day away, let alone change what happened on it.

There we sat at Legends—Curt, Kathryn, I think one more person, probably Robbie, and myself. It was a Sunday night, and we were there to watch the WWF pay-per-view, which some marketing genius had decided to call "Over The Edge." Looking back, the foreshadowing of that name is more than a little eerie.

Owen Hart, Bret's baby brother, an incredible wrestler & someone who you could just feel was a legitimately good guy in real life, was scheduled to face a fellow wrestler known as The Godfather, a 6'6", 330 lbs man playing a fun-loving pimp. Owen was going to win the No. 2 title in the company that night, under the guise of The Blue Blazer, a cartoony gimmick he originally had back in 1988-89 when he first broke into the WWF.

The plan was to lower Owen down from the rafters of Kansas City's Kemper Arena, some 78 feet down. WCW did it all the time with Sting—he'd been doing it for two and a half years to that point. You get a strong harness, strap everything in properly, make sure the weight-bearing straps and hook are in place and tight, and you're good to go. But Owen had a bad feeling about the stunt. He was supposed to do a practice drop during the afternoon walk-through, but he procrastinated enough to avoid doing it.

Not realizing that there's a live feed delay during pay-per-views, I vividly remember looking at the myriad small tv's along the side wall that we were watching, specifically the 4th of the six. The camera went from a normal angle to a super-wide angle pan out, but you couldn't really see anything. After several seconds, you heard microphones hitting a table—the announcers had taken their headsets off. For several minutes, this is all you saw—a wide shot...of nothing. We were left to openly wonder, “What is going on?”

I didn't want to listen to this instinct, but I could feel that something bad had happened. Something really bad. And then you heard the headsets get picked back up, and the camera shot was now square on Jim Ross, the lead announcer and Vice President of Talent Relations (he hired and fired the wrestlers along with being a Hall Of Fame announcer). Ross looked as distraught as someone stricken with Bell's Palsy a couple years back could. And then, after a few seconds of explaining that what he was about to say was not part of a storyline but rather, real life, he said the words, that as they run through my mind right now, send shivers through my neck, up to my head, and down to my back.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Owen Hart, has died."

I'm really not good with death. If there is one thing that I can easily say I'm not good with, it's death. Sometimes when someone dies, I don't feel it that much. When my Papa died, the greatest man I ever knew, I didn't feel it that much—I didn't even cry. It's not because I didn't love him like no other & didn't cherish every waking second I spent with him...I just didn't feel it—the numbness was my defense mechanism. Other times, with people I wouldn't necessarily expect to, I feel it. When Owen died, I was heartbroken. Absolutely devastated. And I wasn’t alone.  The entire wrestling world—wrestlers, management, the fans, all over the world, were absolutely crushed by his death.

Owen always played the bad guy, but he did it in such a way that his heart, his amazing heart, always shone through. He had a beautiful bride, Martha, who he'd been with for about half of his 34 years, and two young children, Oje and Athena. They were nearing completion on their dream home in Calgary. He was going to retire in two years, and become a firefighter. He was one of the few, from a dark, dark behind-the-scenes era of drug abuse and life-destroying politics who didn't LIVE wrestling. He did it, he was absolutely one of the best in the world at it, but he didn't let it envelop his being. He lived for his family, his wife and kids, for Bret, and their parents. He was one of the good ones, whom everyone backstage loved. And he was gone.

I have this massive scrapbook somewhere, with something like 22 newspaper articles glued into it, from Owen's death. It was how I grieved I guess. Martha successfully settled a lawsuit with Vince McMahon, Kemper Arena, and the makers of the harness, some company I believe from England. It was never supposed to come out, but Owen's parents got $1 million each, and Martha got either $16 million or $18 million. Ironically though, she, like Owen, never cared for money, and the vindication of the civil suit did nothing to ease the pain of losing her soul-mate, the father of her children. She always hated wrestling, yet she married into the First Family of Canadian Wrestling. A family that she now has nothing to do with—not even Bret, Owen's best friend, and her personal spokesman after Owen's death.

It took Bret seven years to bring himself to write about Owen's tragic death, and as I brace myself to read page after page that will surely break my heart, though nothing compared to what Martha and Bret, and Oje and Athena felt, I'm amazed at how fresh it always feels, how real the pain still is. I never cried when Owen died, as much as I wanted to. Yet as I type this, I do so with tears in my eyes. We all want to be remembered in this life, and Owen Hart, he is, was, and always will be worth remembering.